Recruitment

We are delighted that EY have today opened their student recruitment process for 2015/16, with the headline-grabbing announcement that they have dropped academic screening criteria from their recruitment process. This has been made possible through our work with EY over the last 7 years, in which we have been able to demonstrate that strengths-based recruitment is better able to predict success in role than academic screening criteria such as degree class or UCAS points.

The intention of EY in making this change is to level the playing field in order to attract talent from across a more even and fair playing field, enabling opportunity for all and promoting social mobility as a result.

This is one of EY’s many demonstrations of commitment to social mobility under their Champion status of the Social Mobility Business Compact, of which Capp are also signatories. As part of the recruitment process, EY are also partnering with Capp and Jobmi to monitor social mobility in the most comprehensive way that has been attempted to date in student recruitment.

We look forward to further announcements, insights and results as this progresses.

Today’s BBC News article - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-33109052 – simply serves to confirm what we have known at Capp and been working to address for a long time – that many recruitment processes are unfairly discriminating against candidates from diverse social backgrounds, simply by virtue of how these recruitment processes are designed.

My presentation to the Association of Graduate Recruiters Student Recruitment Trade Show in January this year showed exactly how. In reality, it’s pretty simple to introduce systematic bias into your recruitment process, even when you don’t mean to – just by using arbitrary screening criteria.

These arbitrary screening criteria include things like requiring a certain number of UCAS points (e.g., 300 UCAS points), a certain degree class (e.g., 2.1 or above), or attendance at a certain university (e.g., a Russell Group university).

In some recruitment processes, if you fall down on any of these criteria, you’re automatically screened out. This is how talent is wasted and opportunities are missed.

Capp are proud signatories of the Social Mobility Business Compact, set up by the previous coalition government to promote social mobility in organisations. For years we have been working to address precisely these issues. The way we do this is pretty simple: Data and analytics.

Traditional recruitment processes introduced arbitrary screening criteria as a way of managing recruitment volumes. That is entirely understandable, if not entirely defensible in the modern day. With what we know now about assessment, and with insights from assessment data and analytics, there is no need for organisations to rely on arbitrary screening to manage candidate volumes any more.

Instead, organisations should embrace social mobility and discover hidden talent through assessing what really matters in the people they recruit, rather than depending on arbitrary information about the person’s background to date. As Capp defines it, social mobility is where your background doesn’t define your future opportunities. You do.

Working with Nestlé and using our platform Jobmi, the job matching place, we were able to remove the traditional screening criteria and use a comprehensive assessment suite that measured candidates’ fit with Nestlé as an organisation, their match with the role, their potential and future capability. The results? Of their 2015 hiring intake, Nestlé found that 21% of their candidates would not even have passed their previous screening criteria.

That’s right, 1 in 5 people of those who were actually hired would have been missed under the previous recruitment process. This is the peril of depending on arbitrary selection criteria, but also the opportunity of moving to embrace assessment by data and analytics insights.

Further, Nestlé gave every single applicant to them a second opportunity if they were unsuccessful, by signing up to Decline to Jobmi – http://www.capp.co/decline-to-jobmi . Decline to Jobmi invites every candidate who isn’t a match for your organisation to join Jobmi, the job matching place, where they have new opportunities to be matched to their perfect job.

Nestlé candidates loved this, and thought it spoke volumes about Nestlé’s commitment to social mobility and corporate social responsibility.

Congratulations to BBC News for highlighting a longstanding and insidious challenge to the opportunities of talented people from all walks of life. The good news is that innovative and forward-thinking organisations are already doing things differently to solve this problem and find hidden talent.

We’re delighted to announce that Jobmi has partnered with Lloyds Banking Group and The Telegraph to launch The 2015 Employability Survey, as featured on page W12 of the Education section in Telegraph Weekend.

Jobmi worked with Lloyds and The Telegraph to design the survey questions that will be presented to thousands of young people, parents and teachers over the coming months.

The survey includes questions about perceptions of current careers advice, what would be most helpful in careers advice, the role of strengths in careers, and how young people make career decisions today.

The results will be shared with all respondents, as well as being published in The Telegraph when analysis is complete.

Social mobility and equality of opportunity is at the heart of our work in strengths-based recruitment and through the Jobmi platform. This is evidenced by the successes we have achieved in delivering improved recruitment outcomes for gender balance, ethnic balance, and balance of social background across a wide range of our clients across a wide range of industries and sectors.

With Jobmi, we set out to level the playing field of social mobility by enabling candidates to be assessed on the data about their fit to the role, rather than otherwise largely arbitrary screening criteria about the number of UCAS points a person has, or the degree classification they might have achieved.

In supporting the Social Mobility Business Compact, we are publicly stating our commitment to improve social mobility and equality of opportunity, of course through our own recruitment practices, where this is a given, but also through the work we do with many of our clients to achieve these same aims.

Longstanding Capp client EY is a Social Mobility Business Compact Champion, and having delivered strengths-based graduate recruitment for EY for the last 7 years, we are delighted to be extending our work with them to improve outcomes in social mobility through their recruitment processes as well.

The biggest challenge faced by every Head of Recruitment in changing their recruitment practices to improve social mobility and equality of opportunity is doing so in a pragmatic and practical way that continues to ensure quality of hire, is efficient and affordable, and is defensible across all stakeholder groups.

With Jobmi we have achieved this.

We look forward to transforming the social mobility landscape through improving equality of access and opportunity for people from all backgrounds and walks of life. We are doing this through harnessing the power of assessment insights, predictive data analytics and Internet platform network effects, all of which we combine within Jobmi.

Practical and pragmatic approaches to transforming social mobility through recruitment are now here.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Bright Futures Employability event in Birmingham, which featured employers, students and school pupils all sharing ideas on the theme of youth employability. There were some fantastic speakers, including Francesca Campalani from Lloyds Banking Group who gave a passionate talk sharing her vision for employability and how this has changed over the years. Another of the keynote speakers was Capp’s CEO, Alex Linley, whose talk explored strengths and the vital importance of knowing and deploying your strengths to full effect. In the world of modern recruitment it has never been so important to have solid self-awareness , so that when young people are applying for roles they can share their strengths in a confident and passionate manner.

One of the other main themes I took from the event was about technology and innovation, as we see the rise of fresh approaches in the recruitment space, including the move to video interviewing by a number of large organisations. To really maximise the use of new technology when moving through the recruitment process, we heard a lot about the importance of self-awareness in young people. Knowing their strengths and skills means that young people are able to be more effective and confident when showcasing themselves. This will undoubtedly lead to them having a higher degree of employability and enable them to get the best role possible.

Bright Futures has committees across the UK and in over 60 universities their members are currently using the Jobmi platform (www.jobmi.com) to identify and understand their strengths, as a result of the partnership between Bright Futures and Capp. Jobmi is Capp’s free to use employability platform that acts as a career companion by offering free assessments which identify strengths and give feedback on how best to deploy those strengths both when searching for positions and in role. By really harnessing their strengths and skills, young people can really improve their employability factor and find the right role in the right organisation. This is what it is really all about in the end; getting the job that fits you and finding an organisation that reflects your own values. The Bright Futures event gave people lots of help and guidance on how they can and should do this.

A Level results day… a nervous wait then if you are a school leaver in the build up to a dizzying mix of emotions related to your UCAS points: meeting offers; missing offers; considering differed placements; considering adjustments to courses; or, reconsidering further education entirely.

Your A Level results are a milestone, greeted with either gratification and celebration or, a day that knocks your confidence and tests your resolve to quickly respond. If you miss the grades required to secure your first choice subject or degree, it’s important to remember that setbacks happen to everyone. Resilience helps you to stay calm, recover quickly and proactively seek alternatives. Since, this is unlikely to be your first (or last) situation when you’re expected to cope with adversity, it’s helpful to know that lots of characteristics define resilience.

Resilient people tend to have a blend of self-belief, energy and positive outlook. But, you are just as likely to draw on things unique to you in order to cope with tough times – for example, your sense of humour or setting clear goals.

Resilience is not fixed – this means that your levels of resilience can fall if you’re feeling drained, stressed or not looking after yourself. Equally, there are lots of ways that you can increase or top-up your levels of resilience. One tip, is to learn from resilient role models. You don’t need to know anyone famous, your resilient role models can be your friends or family members. Learn what helps them to recover from setbacks – that way, you might be able to cope better in a difficult situation, by asking yourself, “What would they do?”

If you would like to learn more about your strengths, www.Jobmi.com offers FREE assessments to help you find out and learn more about yourself, empowering you to find the right career.

If you need support and you’re looking for courses through Clearing, The Telegraph Clearing Hub has been set up to support you http://clearing.telegraph.co.uk/, and UCAS offer telephone support for school leavers and parents on 0371 468 0468, or see their website http://www.ucas.com/

For further information about Strengths and the work Capp do to help organisations with their school leaver, apprenticeship and diversity needs, please contact Capp on +44 (0)2476 323 363, or connect with me, Nick Hayter via LinkedIn - and good luck if you are waiting for your results.

With the Commonwealth Games in full swing, I thought it would be great to share with you ways in which we can all be part of a winning team by using our strengths. Referring to the strengths and Strengths Families from Capp’s online strengths identification tool, Realise2, what do you bring to situations that make a winning combination?

Competitive: Let us start with the most obvious. You love winning and this will usually be the only acceptable option for you as it probably hurts to lose! You are used to leading and being part of a winning team. Competitive was one of the top weaknesses in the UK in our Realise2 study so consider how can you support others and role model your talent to encourage others’ competitiveness.

Motivation: What are your motivation strengths and how will these deliver your competitive goals? If you have Work Ethic or Persistence, you can put the time, energy and effort into keeping going to make sure you achieve success. If you have Drive you will push yourself to win as you love achieving the demanding goals you have set yourself. Those with a sense of Adventure will compete successfully by pushing the boundaries and achieving the impossible.

Thinking: If you are naturally gifted in your brainpower, what thinking strengths can help you win? You may want to come up with the newest or most creative idea in your organisation. Perhaps your Judgement helps you make winning decisions or your organisational strengths of Planful or Order make sure you get to the top of your game with the right resources and in a timely manner.

Relationships: If people are your focus you might not have thought too much about winning but your skill at getting the best from people will help deliver winning targets and goals through others. If you are emotionally connected with others use this talent to pick up on clues of others strengths and weaknesses to channel their energy in the right direction. If you are the natural Connector, use your network to put the winning team or resources together.

Being: Some of the Being strengths are all about ‘Making a Difference’ for example, Mission, Legacy, Service and Moral Compass. By aligning your passions and values together with your goals, it won’t be long before your commitment to the task sees you outperforming others and driving teams forward positively.

Communication: The key to getting others on board to deliver performance. With Narrator as a strength, your talent for storytelling and anecdotes is a powerful and convincing message to others as to why they should outperform. Perhaps you offer the Counterpoint, always looking for alternatives so you can achieve success another way if you come across challenges. The ability to use your Explainer and Scribe to avoid jargon and make sure the whole team understands their individual and team goals will be a powerful combination.

So, the next time you are working towards a winning goal, compete in a way that plays to your strengths and you are far more likely to maintain your engagement and get to the result you want.

Realise2 is the leading online strengths identification and development tool, used by 80,000+ to unlock the potential of individuals and teams.

To find out more about how using strengths can help your organisation find and retain the right talent, call Capp on +44(0)2476 323 363.

It was a great pleasure to attend and to be involved in this year’s annual conference, which was expertly hosted and organised by the AGR team.

Day one saw us enjoy welcoming delegates to two completely packed Masterclass Sessions entitled ‘Turning Early Years Attraction and Recruitment on its Head’, which allowed us to showcase some of the remarkable achievements strengths assessment has allowed for two of our clients, Nestlé and Morrisons.

Both the sessions allowed for audience participation over and above just typical Q&A and a 60 second interaction with the person you were sat next to was all it took to begin to understand what strengths-based interviewing is all about – with the further recognition of how easily this can be achieved on video!

An informative and educational handout not only contained a free access code to take the Realise2 Strengths Identification Test (www.realise2.com) but also a simple guide that explains how individual strengths are accounted and recognised.

In addition to sharing these useful tools, we took the opportunity to showcase Jobmi, the premier platform for job-seeker discovery and guidance – supporting people in understanding what type of career is best suited to their strengths (www.jobmi.com).

Excitingly for us, the questions from the floor in both classes and those asked by people who came up to us afterwards, really did highlight the fact that more and more people are ‘getting it’. Strengths-based assessment has got some serious momentum and the appetite amongst those in attendance was plain to see.

In summary it was a great couple of days and a great opportunity for us show how strengths-based assessment has demonstrated time and time again to deliver cost savings across the recruitment process, a higher quality of candidate at each stage of the process and a better fit and more productive employee into the workplace.

As The Strengths Specialists, we’d be delighted to talk to you more about how strengths assessment and development can make a huge impact in your business.

If you would like further information on the results shared by Tom and Hannah, please get in touch to request a copy of their case studies and also a copy of the Masterclass slide deck.

“Small jobs make a big difference to young people.” This was the keynote message delivered by Michael Davies, the Chief Executive of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) last week. Mr Davies opened the launch of ‘Precarious Futures: Youth Employment in an International Context’ report, hosted in the Science Museum.

I attended with the great and good from industry, parliament and academia to hear the UKCES’s recommendations for addressing youth unemployment today.

The resounding conclusion was clear: any kind of work experience significantly improves the career trajectory of young people today.

And why is this? We heard business leaders across the world describe how their early employment experiences shaped their learning agility, skills and knowledge, fundamentally preparing them for the world of work. This ranged from:

Working in a newsagent (Fiona Kendrick, Chief Executive and Chairman of Nestlé UK and Ireland) honing interpersonal skills and the true meaning of supply and demand

Working in McDonalds (Jill Huntley, Managing Director of Corporate Citizenship, Accenture) developing an appreciation for work ethic and the advancement one earns as a result

Delivering a paper round (Michael Davies, the Chief Executive of the UKCES) building trust with others and the value of team work

Interestingly, the UKCES report reveals that from over 90,000 organisations surveyed, nearly 25% of those who recruit school leavers cite lack of work experience or maturity as a key constraint in this population. This was closely followed by poor attitude or lack of motivation at 18%. By contrast, the technical side looks bright with only 4% citing poor numeracy and literacy skills as a barrier.

From my perspective, these findings imply a largely eager, technically able population of young people, hungry to enter the employment market but with no evidence to showcase their potential.

I left the event feeling that businesses are certainly striving to enable young people to enter their organisation at flexible levels. From the Nestlé Academy, to Google’s 3000 strong Internship programme, the initiatives are there.

My challenge is this: how do we assess young people, who do not have the employment history from which to build their personal business case?

Working with school leaver and graduate recruiters across sectors, such as professional services, FMCG and IT, I hear the same thing. ”We want talented, ambitious, hard working and agile individuals”.

While past experience has traditionally been a predictor of job success, at Capp we know from a decade of research that the study of one’s individual’s strengths, not what you have done, is a truer insight to a young person’s readiness to enter work.

This sits at the core of our recruitment methodology and for me, provides the how in addition to the what we can all do to address youth employment today.

Nestlé Academy Fast Start ProgrammeCase Study

A great example of success in recruiting young people is the industry-leading Nestlé Academy Fast Start Programme, a three year scheme for school leavers. Capp worked in partnership with Nestlé to define the indicators of success and to design an assessment strategy capable of identifying individuals’ potential for success, without relying on candidates’ limited previous work experience. The three main challenges were:

To increase social mobility in the recruitment process – a programme that would enable anyone, regardless of their background the opportunity to ‘learn while you earn’.

To differentiate Fast Start from other school leaver programmes.

To identify candidates with high potential, not based on limited previous work experience.

The success of this scheme won Capp & Nestlé the Best Apprentice/School Leaver Recruitment Strategy Category at the Recruiter Awards 2014. To read about the business outcomes, please see more in our case study here.

For further information on strengths-based assessment, apprenticeships and young careers please contact Claire Marr, Client Services Manager at capp@capp.co or telephone +44 (0)2476 323 363 or Link In with me, Helen Dovey at uk.linkedin.com/in/helendovey

On Monday 9 June, I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the inaugural UK STEM Awards at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The Telegraph, in partnership with Babcock International Group hosted an excellent ceremony which celebrated the talent of our young and aspiring scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians (STEM). Launched in March, the initiative invited students to submit their ideas for tackling real-life challenges, on the condition that entries were feasible, original and beneficial to society.

Video presentations summarised the winning ideas in five categories, each sponsored by a prestigious employer in the industry: Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline; Automotive, McLaren Group; Environment, Semta; Construction, Atkins; Defence, BAE Systems. The overall winner was Holly Bishop, studying at Plymouth University, for her concept of a medication reminder bracelet with a light and vibration reminder that is only deactivated by scanning the medication box, thus ensuring the medication is taken. Holly’s prize was a cheque for £25,000, as well as a bespoke mentoring programme from a senior engineer at Babcock (an amazing opportunity for self-development and career planning).

We were also treated to speakers from government, academia and the sponsor businesses; all were unequivocal in their passion for STEM-related studies, reminding us how crucial these subjects are in the design and production of literally everything we interact with on a daily basis.

In summary, the awards ceremony opened up my eyes to three main things:

First, it showed me how important it is to position and celebrate the sciences in schools and colleges. (Maths homework will seem a lot more worthwhile, if you know the benefits it can bring to you and society.)

Second, it confirmed that technology and engineering companies need to continue their efforts in creating roles that inspire current and future STEM-students – otherwise mass migration towards other professions will continue.

Third, I couldn’t help but think how Jobmi can benefit the students and employers that I saw at the awards, by helping to identify young people with a passion for sciences and match them to the right employers. It encourages me to know that the eventual outcome of this, enables our future scientists and engineers to improve the way we all go about our daily lives.

The UK STEM Awards for 2015 is already in planning – I am really looking forward to seeing the new challenges that students will take on, and hope I can attend the awards next year too! To read about the awards, see here.

For further information on how Capp can help your organisation find the right talent, please call Nick Hayter on Tel +44 (0) 2476 323 363 , email nick.hayter@capp.co or Link in with me here.